Teacher professional development through a physical computing workshop

In recent years there has been a push towards more CS and STEM education in Flanders. These two domains require a set of skills with which teachers are currently often unfamiliar. To enable teachers to acquire these skills, professional development programs should be implemented. In this paper we first present a way of identifying the properties of such a program to allow comparison with other programs. Next, we describe a professional development program in the form of a physical computing workshop

Bringing computer science education to secondary school : a teacher first approach

The Progra-MEER professional development workshop is a one year program organized collaboratively by the computer science departments of three Flemish universities. It aims to improve the computer science knowledge of in service teachers in a physical computing context. Since Flemish schools are starting to implement STEM in their schools, the program links computer science to STEM and project based learning. This paper gives a description of the design and implementation of the program while providing an analysis of its strengths and weaknesses. We show that the program leads to the successful implementation of different physical computing projects. However, it needs to further support the practical project implementations while spending more attention on assessment and context definition. Additionally, the program has to invest more effort in creating a sustainable community of practice so knowledge and experiences can still be shared even after the program has finished

Modeling the target selection process of residential burglars in Flanders at the community, neighborhood and house-level

Burglars rely on a spatially structured, hierarchical, sequential selection process when selecting targets. They initially select a suitable area and then gradually narrow down their selection until they have identified the house they intend to burglarize. The ultimate outcome of this target selection process is a particular house. However, until now studies on burglary location choice modelled this process with larger spatial units of analysis such as residential neighborhoods, census blocks or small-scaled postal code areas as the outcome. This study investigates burglary target location choice in Flanders, Belgium. It introduces two advances over previous studies. First, it models burglars’ choice for a particular target at the actual outcome of their selection process: the house. Second, it simultaneously includes measures for municipality, neighborhood and house-level environmental factors in order to better understand the hierarchical interplay between environmental characteristics in burglars’ target selection process. This study uses burglary data recorded by the Belgian Federal Police between 2006 and 2012. A total of 721 cleared burglaries undertaken by 574 unique suspects were included. Using discrete spatial choice modeling, we estimate the effects of municipality, neighborhood and house-level environmental factors on residential burglary target selection in Flanders, Belgium

Characterization of PECVD Silicon Nitride Photonic Components at 532 and 900 nm Wavelength

Low temperature PECVD silicon nitride photonic waveguides have been fabricated by both electron beam lithography and 200 mm DUV lithography. Propagation losses and bend losses were both measured at 532 and 900 nm wavelength, revealing sub 1dB/cm propagation losses for cladded waveguides at both wavelengths for single mode operation. Without cladding, propagation losses were measured to be in the 1-3 dB range for 532 nm and remain below 1 dB/cm for 900 nm for single mode waveguides. Bend losses were measured for 532 nm and were well below 0.1 dB per 90 degree bend for radii larger than 10 mu m